Research News

Violent news videos can be moral motivator, UB researcher says

By BERT GAMBINI

“If you’ve made the decision that people need to know about this, then why pull back and not show them why they should care?”

Matthew Grizzard, assistant professor

Department of Communication

Violent news events present editors with a troubling
journalistic decision: How much of the violence, if any, should the
audience see as part of the story?

Matthew Grizzard, assistant professor in the Department of
Communication, says his latest research suggests editors should
include violent video in those stories they consider to be
genuinely newsworthy.

“Showing graphic content and providing a more accurate and
complete representation of severe events can motivate people to
care more about what they’re seeing,” says Grizzard, an
expert on the cognitive and emotional effects of media
entertainment. “We see increases in moral sensitivity and a
greater desire for humanitarian and military interventions designed
to stop violence motivated by exposure to more graphic
portrayals.”

The findings appear in the journal Mass Communication and
Society, and stand in striking contrast to the prevailing wisdom
that broadcasting graphically violent news content is gratuitous
and sensationalist.

The Society of Professional Journalists is more specific, going
so far as to state that “common sense” demands that
journalists “recognize that gathering and reporting
information may cause harm and discomfort … and [to] show
good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.”

But Grizzard’s research questions this common-sense
approach to the problem of whether or not to show violent news
content.

“It’s hard to make progress by continuing to say
that all violent content is bad when we lack the empirical evidence
to support such a conclusion,” he says. “One of the
things I’d like to see happen with this research is that we
start looking at the evidence and begin asking what decisions are
justified from evidence rather than tradition.

“Right now, the decision to sanitize violent content
isn’t based on scientific evidence; it’s based on what
we presume to be the effects of showing that content.”

The study results also address disagreement among communication
theorists. Some argue viewers would perceive video that was edited
to remove graphic violence as more severe than an unedited clip
because the human mind in the absence of actual footage would
create details more gruesome than reality. However,
Grizzard’s study does not support this conclusion.

“If that were the case, we would have seen more anger and
disgust in the more sanitized clips,” Grizzard says.

Participants in the study watched one of three versions of a
television network’s story about a mass execution conducted
by ISIS militants. The first version showed only the militants
driving victims to the execution site; a second froze the video
just before the actual shooting; and a third version aired the
video to its unedited violent conclusion.

“When subjects watched the most graphic clip, they felt
the most acute levels of anger and disgust, moral emotions that
predicted increased desire for intervention,” says
Grizzard.

But he still advises caution. The research doesn’t
advocate the wholesale addition of graphic content. News directors
should first consider the story’s importance as a news item,
but once they’ve made a decision to tell a graphic story,
Grizzard says, existing graphic video content should be part of
that story.

“Otherwise you are failing to include the actual
consequences associated with human tragedies,” he says.
“If you’ve made the decision that people need to know
about this, then why pull back and not show them why they should
care?” he asks.